For any and every episode of his life save this, Paul, when he chose to
think about it, could make a fairly expressive picture in his mind, and
could bring back something of the emotion of the time. Here he could
remember only that Laurent clutched him by the arm, and that he turned
on Laurent with something of the vague appeal for aid which might be
imagined in the mind of a frightened child. He saw that a thousand signs
which he should have recognised had escaped him, and in the flush of
real apprehension which followed this thought he seemed to himself to
have been almost wilfully blind to the truth. There were so many things
which might have guided him, and he had taken warning by none of them.
‘I beg your pardon, old chap,’ he said to Laurent, speaking
unconsciously in English, ‘but I’m a little bit upset. You would not
mind lending me your arm inside?’
‘Assuredly not,’ cried Laurent, still supporting him; and the two men
entered the hotel together.
The Solitary still remembered how his clumsy footsteps seemed to fumble
at the stone stairs, and the very pressure of Laurent’s arm upon his
own shoulder was still a living sensation with him; yet for the actual
moment thought and sensation alike seemed to have been abolished.
Laurent, when the study had once been reached, helped Paul into a chair,
and stood over him with a look of friendly solicitude.
‘A little stimulant, I think,’ he said at last, in a tone of
commonplace, and set a hand on the decanter which Annette had so
recently laid down.
‘Not that, Laurent!’ cried Paul, with a gesture the other was swift to
interpret.
The doctor left the room with a meaningless, friendly tap on Paul’s
shoulder, and came back a few instants later with a bottle of brandy.
‘I insist,’ he said commandingly, in answer to Paul’s rejecting wave of
the hand.
When Laurent insisted there were few people who said him nay, and Paul
took the potion which was poured out for him.
He could remember it all, from this point onward, as if he had been a
mere disinterested spectator of the scene. He could see his own figure
straightening itself mechanically in the chair in which it sat. He could
see himself mechanically throwing one leg over another, and assuming an
attitude of indifference and ease. He could see himself distinctly in
the act of knocking out the ashes of his pipe upon the grate; in the
refilling and lighting of it; in the numberless little gestures which
seemed to indicate an entire possession of himself And all the while
something was booming in his mind as if the word ‘lost ‘were only half
articulated there--a scarcely uttered word that carried doom with it.
‘I do not know,’ said Laurent, speaking, for a man of his experience
and authority, rather brokenly--‘I do not know whether it was my duty to
have spoken earlier. I have not known you very long; but we have learned
to like each other, and I would have done you the service to tell you
what I knew a month or two ago if I could have found the courage. But I
will ask you to believe that I was much perplexed, and that I could not
resolve in my own mind whether or not you knew already. It would have
seemed a cruel thing to intrude upon such a secret.’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, breaking silence for the first time since he had
entered the house, ‘I understand that’ He pulled gravely at his pipe,
and sipped again at the glass Laurent had poured out for him. ‘What’s
going to be done?’ he asked; and then, with a sudden petulance, ‘What
have I got to do?’
‘In a patient so young,’ said Laurent, ‘unless there is some hereditary
taint to combat, there should be no impossibility in establishing a
cure. What of Madame Armstrong’s heredity?’ What did Paul know of Madame
Armstrong’s heredity? Save for a casual glimpse of her sister, who had
seemed to him as commonplace as candle-light, he had no knowledge of any
person of her name or family. He sat silent, not knowing how to express
his ignorance without compromising Annette and himself. But Laurent
pressed him.
‘Do you know of anything,’ he asked, ‘which should make the task of cure
difficult?’ And, being thus pressed, there seemed nothing for it but for
Paul to say that he knew nothing. ‘Then,’ said Laurent, ‘we must not
despair. I have already spoken to your wife, and have pointed out to
her the very serious nature of her danger, and she has promised me
amendment. With what result,’ he added, throwing his arms abroad, ‘you
see.’
‘You think it a serious danger? Paul asked him.
‘My God!’ ejaculated Laurent--‘serious! But an instant, my dear
Armstrong. We are not thinking of a male inebriate; we are thinking of a
woman--a question so different that there is barely any comparison to be
made.’
‘Is that so? said Paul, in a voice of little interest, though he felt
for the moment as if his heart were breaking.
‘That is so,’ returned Laurent, with emphasis; ‘and I can assure you
that, if you desire to effect a cure here, you must betake yourself--and
betake yourself at once--to heroic measures. Your wife must be placed,
without delay, in competent hands, and no restraint must be placed upon
those who undertake to treat her.’
‘Very well,’ said Paul dully, ‘I understand all that We’ll have another
talk in the morning, if you don’t mind.’
Laurent forbore to speak further just then, but he kept Paul in silent
company for an hour, and was more useful in that way than he could have
been if he had poured out the gathered knowledge of an encyclopaedia
upon him. He gave that dumb sense of sympathy which, in hours of deep
distress, is so very much more potent than the spoken word. Paul at last
rose and shook him by the hand.
‘Good-night,’ he said, ‘and thank you.’
Laurent accepted his dismissal, returned the grip, took up his hat
and moved away. It would appear that he had not gone far, for when an
instant later Paul poured out a second or third glass of cognac for
himself, there came a tap upon the study window, and Laurent’s face was
visible there dose to one of the lower panes. Paul threw the window open
and looked out at him.
‘You have something to say?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Laurent, with a grave and tender face, ‘I have this one
thing to say: Do not follow that sorrowful example.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul, ‘have no fear there; my temptation does not lie in that
direction.’
‘My dear young friend,’ said Laurent, ‘no man until he is tempted knows
in what direction his temptation lies.’
They shook hands again through the open window and then parted
definitely for the night.
Paul sat long in the silence, not thinking of anything in particular or
conscious of any particular emotion. The café on the opposite side of
the _place_ had long since closed. When Laurent’s footsteps had faded
out of hearing there was no sound abroad for which it was not necessary
to listen, except when a distant dog barked now and then, or the slow
rumble of a far-off train came once into hearing and disappeared in the
valley with which the railway clove the low hills beyond Janenne. The
dark air of night flowed in through the open window, cool and sweet,
bringing with it the familiar odours of the pine plantations in which
the countryside abounded. Paul smoked pipe after pipe, and he knew very
well that if anybody had been there to look at him, he would have seemed
unmoved, and yet he seemed to himself more than once to be playing the
mountebank with his own trouble, as when, for instance, the lines came
into his mind:
‘Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief has shaken into frost’
But all the while there was a slow anguish rising within him or around
him. It seemed to reach his breast quite suddenly and almost to stop
the beating of his heart. Then it ebbed away again, and he found himself
crooning unemotionally, ‘For years--a measureless ill--for ever, for
ever!’ The pain came back, and once more ebbed away. What was it? he
asked in the self-torturing way which besets the analyst of his own
nature. Self-pity, he answered. Self-pity, pure and simple. He, Paul
Armstrong, furnished with heart and brains and social powers, with
fortune at hand, and fame to be had for the beckoning, had slid into
this sickening quagmire thus early in his life’s pilgrimage, and had
come to an arrest there.
Then, out of this profound despondency he arose to a sudden resolution.
This was not a matter to be despaired of. It was a thing to fight
against, an ill not to be endured, but to be cured. Laurent would help,
but the main share of the conflict must fall upon himself. Almost for
the first time in his life he was conscious of a clear and definite call
to manhood. He was entered for a real strife with Fate--a fight to a
finish. Well, he would not shrink from it He set himself to ask
what weapons he could use. Patience, tact, determination, sleepless
vigilance--they all seemed as if they were to be had for the asking. He
resolved upon them all, and so, having closed the window and put out the
lamp, he walked heavily up to bed.
Annette’s doors were locked, both that which gave upon the corridor and
that which communicated with his own little room. He could but remember
how often they had been closed before, and what varying reasons he had
been forced to seek and find for her isolation of herself. That riddle
was read now. There would be a stormy scene in the morning when he came
to tell Annette that he had solved it, and thinking of how he should
face it, and of what means were the likeliest to lead to ultimate
victory, he lost something of the sickness of his pain. He undressed and
lay down in the dark, but there was no sleep for him until long after
the window-blind had grown amber-tinted with the gleam of the level sun
upon it.
When he awoke his watch told him that it was near ten o’clock. He rang
for his bath, dressed, breakfasted, met the people of the house, and
answered their friendly inquiries as to his journey all pretty much as
if nothing had occurred to change the whole horizon of his life. He made
no inquiries as to Annette, and no news came to him with regard to her.
It was near noonday when Laurent came into his study, very grave and
gray, and looking as if he, too, had had a night of severe trouble.
Paul read the sympathy in his face, and rose to meet him. The two shook
hands, and from that moment there was a real friendship between them.
‘You have seen her? Laurent asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Paul
‘You have thought over what I was compelled to tell you--what you saw?’
‘Yes; I have thought it all over.
‘And your conclusions?’
‘To ask the aid of your experience, and to abide by your advice.’
‘Thank you,’ said Laurent gravely. ‘I, too, have been thinking, and
perhaps, in my judgment, it may be better that I should first see her
alone. In my capacity of physician I can speak impersonally.’
‘I am in your hands,’ Paul answered, ‘and I shall accede to whatever you
think is best.’
‘Well,’ returned Laurent, with a gray smile, ‘I do not commonly advocate
eavesdropping, but I think perhaps it may be as well for you to hear our
talk together. It will guide you as to what you may say or do hereafter.
I will send up my name now, and when I am admitted you may follow to
your own small room. Is that espionage? I do not very greatly care
myself, for I shall warn her from the first that I shall faithfully
report every spoken word so far as I can remember it.’
‘I will come,’ said Paul. ‘I have the right And the more I know the
better I can use it.’
Laurent twirled the milled button of the call-bell which stood upon the
desk.
‘My respects to Madame Armstrong,’ he said, when the landlady’s
middle-aged daughter came in and smoothed her apron as a sign of respect
to Monsieur le Médecin. ‘I am a few moments late, but I am here to keep
my appointment.’
Out went Mademoiselle Adèle, and her slippered footsteps faded up the
staircase. There was a sound of knocking, a conversation inaudible to
the two who strained their ears to listen, and then mademoiselle was
back again.
Madame was _malade--bien malade_--would beg Monsieur le Médecin to
excuse her.
‘Then I will try,’ said Laurent ‘I have your authority?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Paul, and the doctor went creaking up the stairs in
his heavy, country-made boots.
Paul sat alone again and listened with his heart in his ears.
A series of raps sounded upon the door above, at first quiet and
persuasive, and then increasing in intensity. There came a faint sound
of protesting inquiry, and in answer:
‘Dr. Laurent, s’il vous plait, madame.’
There was another protest, and Laurent spoke again:
‘But I am here by appointment, madame, and I cannot afford to waste my
time.’
And just here a curious and rather embarrassing thing happened, for the
doctor, laying a nervous hand upon the door, found it suddenly opened to
him with no symptom of resistance.
‘A thousand pardons!’ he exclaimed. ‘Pray tell me when you are ready.’
Annette was at the door like a wild cat, but the square-built toe of
Laurent’s foot was between it and the jamb. Paul raced up the stairs
in his stocking-feet, his boots in his hand. This was not a time for
delicacies of sentiment He wished to save Annette. He wished even more
to save himself from the misery of a lifelong degradation. He darted
into his own room whilst Laurent was still standing like a statue at the
door of the adjoining chamber, but reached it barely in time, for on a
sudden the door of Annette’s apartment was thrown open, and a voice of
imperious sarcasm demanded to know to what Madame Armstrong was indebted
for this unexpected honour.
‘It will be well,’ said Laurent in his professional tone, ‘for Madame
Armstrong to return to bed.’
He turned the key in the door, and at this Annette sent out shriek on
shriek, until the whole corridor seemed to shrill with the outcry.
‘Madame,’ said Laurent in his deep nasal voice, when the clamour died
down for a moment, ‘your husband is in the house. He is within hearing.
I have his entire authority to speak to you, and I am intent to use it I
am here to tell you that you have abused his absence and his confidence,
and that on his arrival at Janenne last night I told him the result of
my observations during the last four or five weeks.’
Paul, boots in hand, sat on the edge of his own bed, and heard a kind of
gasping noise. Then for a moment there was silence until Laurent spoke
again.
‘If you will permit, madame,’ he said, ‘this interview may go smoothly.
If you choose to be angry, that is your affair. I am authorized by your
husband, as your physician, to speak plain truths to you. You need not
trouble to deny me, but I see you have already been drinking.’
‘How dare you!’ she flashed out, and Paul heard the stamp of her little
naked foot upon the fox-skin rug which lay beside their bed.
‘Madame,’ said Laurent, ‘there is no question of daring or not daring. I
have told your husband everything, and he is sitting in the next room at
this moment, and hears every word we speak.’
‘Paul!’ she cried, ‘Paul is here? Why hasn’t he been to see me? Why has
he no word for me?’
‘Madame,’ said Laurent sternly, ‘I bid you cease these theatrical
pretences. Your unhappy husband saw you last night when you three times
seized the decanter which had been left for him.’
She gasped: ‘You liar!’
‘That is all very well, madame,’ responded Laurent, ‘but my eyes are
mine, and I have known the truth for months past. Why do you venture on
a hope so vain? Now, I will tell you plainly, Madame Armstrong, you
are going on the way to hell. You are to be stopped, and you shall be
stopped. Pray make no mistake as to the authority that is to be exerted.
It shall be exerted as mildly as you permit. It shall be exerted as
inexorably as the necessities of the case demand I have told you already
many times into what a pitfall you were descending, but until last night
I never dared to warn your husband. He knows the truth now, knows
it all, and he leaves you in my hands. You have not heeded advice or
beseeching, and--I say it, believe me, with deep reluctance--we must
draw a cordon about you, and protect you from yourself. Pray understand,
madame, it is a protective cordon only, and your own action may relax it
at any time; but your actions will be watched, as it is my duty to tell
you, to the extremest scruple.’
‘What do you mean to do? Paul heard her ask in a husky, panting voice,
which made him figure in his own mind a hunted creature almost run to
ground.
‘Nothing more,’ Laurent replied, ‘nothing more, madame, believe
me--nothing more than is dictated by the necessities of the case. You
have an ordonnance dating from Paris.
I have instructed the pharmacien that he is no longer to respect it.’
Annette whined at this like a child robbed of a toy.
‘I have forbidden him this morning,’ Laurent pursued, ‘to supply you,
without my special direction, with any drug whatever, and I have given
him particular orders about the eau’des Carmes. I am now about to tell
the hotel people that you are under my care and treatment, and that you
will be allowed only a measured quantity of wine per diem.’
‘You mean to expose me to them?’ Annette asked
‘I do not propose to expose madame to anybody,’ Laurent responded, ‘but
if madame chooses to expose herself----’
The listener could imagine the shrug of the broad shoulders and the
outward cast of the persuasive hands.
‘Voyons, madame,’ pursued the doctor, ‘we wish nothing but your good,
but that we are determined to accomplish. I have nothing to add to what
I have said already, and perhaps it is time that you should see your
husband.’
Paul hastily thrust his feet into his slippers, and awaited the opening
of the door.
‘He is there,’ said Laurent; ‘he has probably listened to every word we
have spoken.’
Paul sat trembling on the bed-edge. The imminent interview disturbed him
strangely, and set all manner of conflicting tides flowing in heart and
brain. He was part coward and part hero; ready to face everything and
to run away from everything. His pity for Annette was pity, and no more;
his sympathy for Paul Armstrong amounted to a passion. He strove to
bring himself to what he conceived to be a more fitting mood, but whilst
he struggled with himself the inner door of the room in which he sat
was suddenly torn open, and Annette stood before him. He could not have
believed, without that actual visual revelation, that such a wreck
could have been achieved in so small a space of time. Whatever of
spirituality, whatever of youthful foolish _espièglerie_ the face had
held, had vanished. The visage was like a mask--and a mask of death.
There was a splash of purplish crimson beneath either eyelid, but for
the rest the face was of the yellow of a week-old bone; the eyelids
were puffy, and the lips were lax. The whole face quivered like a shaken
jelly as she looked at him.
‘Paul,’ she said--’ Paul, Paul!’
And with that she cast herself upon his breast in a very storm of tears.
For a moment he stood helpless and confused, and then a sudden flux of
pity came upon him, and he held her steadily and firmly in answer to the
hysteric grip with which her arms encircled him, now tightening and now
relaxing. She fawned upon him piteously from the very beginning of this
embrace, and at the last she fell, both knees thudding upon the carpet,
and abased her head between his ankles, crying bitterly the while. And
at this whatever manhood was within the man fled for the time being, and
he, kneeling to raise her from her self-abasement, also lifted up his
voice and wept bitterly.
Before things had quite reached this melancholy pass Laurent had stolen
from the room, and had closed both doors behind him, so that husband and
wife were alone.
‘Dearest,’ said Paul, ‘what can I do to help you?’
The word was not wholly sincere, but it held more than the average ounce
of sincerity to the ton which keeps human speech a possibility. At least
his desire was to help her, if it were only a way of helping himself.
But the whole thing was so miserable that to analyze emotions at such
a moment was surely to mount the very Appenines of folly. Annette cried
and cried, with her yet young and supple figure clinging to him, and, in
spite of the debauched, melancholy face, what could he do but stroke her
hair and kiss her cheek, and promise kindness and encouragement? Most
of the time he was inwardly murmuring, ‘Poor devil!’ and was assuring
himself that he had taken up a most hopeless handful; but the whole
wretched tangle of feeling was too intricate to be unravelled by so
much as a straight inch. What could he do? He asked the question
despairingly; he asked it in genuine pity of Annette; he asked it in a
yet more genuine pity of himself. The man who deals professionally with
the emotions of other people cannot preserve the simplicity of his own;
it would be out of nature to believe it.
There was a reconciliation of a sort, but it could hardly be very real
at first, and to give it any aspect of permanence time was necessary.
Laurent and Paul concocted a plan of campaign. It was essential in
the doctor’s opinion to avoid as far as possible all open evidence
of watchfulness, and yet to know very accurately what was being done.
Innumerable attempts were made to break the cordon of guardianship
which was drawn around Annette. She feigned, of course, as people in
her position always feign, to acquiesce entirely in the means which were
adopted to guard her from herself, but there were eternal skirmishes
between the outlying posts of the two armies which came in a very short
time to be established. In that newfound prosperity of his Paul had
grown absolutely careless about money, and he had not the faintest idea
as to the extent of his wife’s supplies. That she had enough, for
the time being, to corrupt quite a small regiment was speedily made
manifest, and a silent contest, in which the victor acknowledged victory
no more than the vanquished admitted defeat, set in. How wide the
ramifications of this strange war might be Paul could not guess, but on
occasion some circumstance would reveal that they had reached unexpected
distances. It was a perfectly understood thing in the hotel itself that
no supplies of wine or of more potent liquor were to be supplied at
Madame Armstrong’s order. The village pharmacien sold nothing to her
without Laurent’s consent, but there were ways and means of one sort or
another by which she contrived to procure her poison, and at such times
the old signs were always perceptible: the passion for solitude,
the tricksy, changing spirit which varied from extravagant mirth
to unreasonable anger. Laurent watched the contest with a sleepless
loyalty, and Annette, finding herself foiled by him a thousand times
oftener than by the less vigilant Paul, grew to hate him. But in spite
of all the unfortunate creature could do to accelerate her own ruin,
she grew slowly back to health, and to something more than her original
personal attractiveness. For a kind of experience was marked upon her,
and the indefinable yet universally recognised expression which betokens
this was present in her looks. When watchfulness prevailed over the
strange craft which was brought into conflict with it, Annette knew how
to be charming, even to the man who suffered so much at her hands; but
when the contrabandists succeeded in running in their supplies there
were hours of horror--scenes in which rage and accusation were succeeded
by storms of tears and tempestuous self-reproach. On one such occasion
Paul sat in his study, for the moment oblivious of the world. His
dissipation and his best relief from the cares which beset him was
labour, and he laboured hard. It was his fashion at this time to stand
at his desk--a rude thing built for him by the village carpenter--and in
the pauses which came in between his actual spells of writing, to stride
about his limited territory, enacting the scenes he was striving to
portray, and shaping his sentences in such an impassioned undertone as
an actor will employ in the study of a part. He was at the limit of
his walk from the window, thus engaged, when the door was violently and
without warning broken open in such fashion that its edge struck him on
the face. Here was Annette, blazing with some newly-discovered injury,
and Paul at once recognised the ancient and too-well-remembered
symptoms. The contrabandists had got through again, and this time with
a vengeance. When he could gather his scattered wits--the blow in itself
had been a shrewd thing--he found that he was being stormily assailed in
respect of an amour with the cook of the Hotel of the Three Friends, a
highly respectable person of fifty summers and a waist of sixty inches
in circumference. He closed the door, and, mopping his injured nose,
invited Annette to a seat.
‘Talk lower, dear,’ he asked her. ‘It shall be perfectly understood
between us that I deserve all your reproaches, but don’t give the poor,
dear old cook away, or, if you must assail her, speak in English.’
‘That is your ring,’ said Annette. She drew her wedding-ring from her
finger and cast it to the floor. ‘I have done with you for ever; you are
a traitor and a villain.’
Paul stooped for the ring as it rolled to his feet, and bestowed it in
his pocket.
‘You and Laurent,’ cried Annette, ‘have conspired to kill me. Oh, I know
you both! but if there is justice in earth or heaven, I will have it Do
not think because I am a woman and alone that I can find no protector. I
am not so helpless as you fancy.’
‘I am very busy, dear,’ Paul answered in a cold desperation, ‘and we
might discuss these important questions at another moment.’
‘Oh,’ cried Annette, ‘anything to avoid the truth!’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, with the first flush of anger he had permitted
himself, ‘anything to avoid the truth--anything, or almost anything; but
if you stay here one other moment I will avoid the truth no longer.’
He cast the door wide open, and Annette with an amazing submissiveness
passed through it.
It was long past mid-autumn by this time, and was indeed fast drawing
on towards winter, so that in the little study a fire was lit in the
earlier hours of the day to air the room. It had been lighted that
morning, and the first true nip of winter was in the air. Paul sat alone
with his head between his hands until a violent shiver aroused him from
his thoughts. The air was growing dark as well as chilly; a pale yellow
light gleamed already from the windows of the Café de la Régence across
the _place_, and the outlook was as chilly as the air, as comfortless as
the thoughts which filled his mind.
‘Hands up,’ said Paul to himself; ‘hands up and sink down into the waste
waters, and have done with it.’
Of what act of desperation he would have been guilty in this mood he
could never have told, but at this instant the door was opened very
softly, and Annette was back again. She had been somewhat dishevelled
at her last appearance, and carelessly attired. She had now, to all
seeming, called in the aid of the solitary coiffeur of the village, and
her pretty brown locks were done up in lustrous coils. She was attired
in a charming little dressing-gown of pale-blue, with lace at the wrists
and throat, and her complexion had been somewhat rudely brightened by a
touch of red upon the cheeks. She closed the door softly behind her, and
advanced with pleading hands.
‘Paul dear,’ she said, ‘I do not know if ever you can forgive me, but I
think you would, perhaps, if you knew the real truth about me. Oh, Paul,
Paul, Paul, I am afraid--I am afraid that I am going mad! I have no
self-control. I say cruel and wicked things without believing them, and
I cannot help it There is a devil in my soul who tempts me. What is a
poor little girl like me to do against the devil? Won’t you help me,
Paul dear? Give me back my ring; I never meant to throw it away. There
is nothing I value so much in the world. Give it back to me, Paul.
There; put it on my finger. God bless you for ever, you dearest,
dearest, kindest, patient dear! And now, Paul, take me in your arms as
you used to do. Kiss me, and tell me that you love me. I’m only a little
creature, Paul, when everything’s said and done; I’m five feet three,
English measure, and how can _I_ be expected to fight a devil! Kiss me,
kiss me again, Paul.’
She thrust him back with rage, tore the ring once more from her finger,
and cast it again upon the floor. Then, with an air of comedy disdain,
‘It is really too cheap a thing to fool a fool like you.’ And so, with a
shrill peal of stagey laughter, she curtseyed low to him and glided from
the room.
He stood with clenched hands for a single instant, and--how he never
knew--came to a sudden calm. He took up his hat from the desk on which
he had thrown it on entering the room, and sauntered out to the front
of the hotel in a complete vacancy of thought and emotion; and as he
lounged there, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, there was
woven into the woof of life the next thread of his destiny, for who
should drive up to the main door of the Three Friends, with her maid and
her luggage, and all the airs and impertinences of a person of fashion,
but La Femme Incomprise.